An enormous, mysteriously stationary structure high over the surface of Venus may be the largest gravity wave in the Solar System, according to Japanese astronomers.
In 2015, cameras onboard the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft Akatsuki captured images of a humungous boomerang-shaped bulge measuring more …

Click baity headline is click bait

Re: Click baity headline is click bait

I remember when ironic headlines lampooning the bonkers Brit tabloid culture weren't called clickbait, they were just Register headlines. This is back before the kids ruined everything with their Upworthies and BuzzFeeds.

Re: Click baity headline is click bait

Re: Click baity headline is click bait

I think that irony is misunderstood and the word misused a lot lately. The headline is parody and satire and it's corny but I'd say it's not ironic. If it turns out that it really is an alien structure than that would be ironic.

Re: Click baity headline is click bait

"Isn't it ironic" is a question and is not semantically equivalent to the statement "All that follows is (or is not) ironic".

If all that follows is clearly not ironic then the question itself *could* be intended to be ironic, with the implication that the positor of the question is well aware of the lack of irony and is precipitating in the respondent the notion that the non-ironic observations may be ironic when they are not.

Or the positor is just using "ironic" poetically or even perhaps ignorantly.

Re: Click baity headline is click bait

The majority of Reg readers, and other star gazers (armchair or otherwise) know that 'Alien Megastructure' is shorthand for 'Hmm, we've observed something weird that we can't yet explain'. The use of the phrase isn't to deceive, but to make you feel a part of the gang you in the joke.

Were a flying saucer the size of Australia suddenly appear in Earth orbit, I'd likely hear about it on the radio ("We interrupt this broadcast with a special bulletin..." ) and would then drive straight to the pub. There I can find beer, lots of beer, some physicists and, should the UFO prove to unfriendly, a willing member of barstaff to spend my last five minutes with.

Re: Click baity headline is click bait

"Were a flying saucer the size of Australia suddenly appear in Earth orbit, I'd likely hear about it on the radio ("We interrupt this broadcast with a special bulletin..." ) and would then drive straight to the pub. There I can find beer, lots of beer, "

Re: Click baity headline is click bait

By that definition, anything extra-terrestrial would be alien, making the term redundant in this context. The whole planet Venus is alien. The word "Alien" in the clickbait headline is capitalised making it into a noun suggestive of "living aliens" rather than an entity.

Will nobody think of the tax payers?

Let me check I've understood this correctly. You're telling me that if you want to detect gravity waves, there was no need to spend $620million overhauling the LIGO detectors? We could have just pointed a telescope at Venus?

Re: Will nobody think of the tax payers?

Re: Will nobody think of the tax payers?

Thank you, Spacedinvader, for that clarification.

It is a pity the Reg could not make it that clear in the first place. They seem to have lost all their science-qualified writers who could examine critically a press release or abstract rather than just copying the words.

Re: Re: Will nobody think of the tax payers?

"It is a pity the Reg could not make it that clear in the first place. They seem to have lost all their science-qualified writers who could examine critically a press release or abstract rather than just copying the words."

Are you kidding me??? We used the correct term in the correct context, and we're the ones who screwed up?

So you're saying we have to caveat everything we write in case someone doesn't understand. You want articles that read like: "The board has 4GB of RAM – that's readable-writeable memory not read-only ROM - and an ARMv8 CPU - that's CPU not GPU..."

Get outta here.

PS: The article was written by someone with an astrophysics degree and edited by someone with an engineering degree.

Re: Will nobody think of the tax payers?

"gravity wave - a wave propagated on a liquid surface or in a fluid through the effects of gravity."

Only problem with applying that definition to the phenomenon observed on Venus is that the 'wave' is stationary and so isn't 'propagated'.

My best guess (lacking data) would be that it's an amplified mountain wave, the amplification coming from the combination of the high density and speed, and therefore momentum, of Venus's atmosphere. Purely a guess though.

Re: Will nobody think of the tax payers?

They are entirely different things. Gravity waves are mundane, easy to see and to measure. Gravitational waves are so small and faint as to be virtually undetectable, even the ones created when black holes collide.

This one is a gravity wave.

The ones detected by LIGO are gravitational waves.

Not the same thing.

However I do agree with you that the similarity in terminology is an open door to confusion.

Re: Will nobody think of the tax payers?

It'll turn out to be something like slow moving sulphur snow clouds or something we aren't used to looking at. The scale of it would seem far too big to be anything artificial or life-based. Although, there's no harm in sending a probe to take a look...

@smartermind

" the probe will be fried within minutes in the sulphuric acid atmosphere of Venus"

So it sounds like we need to fund research into developing probes that are made out of sulphuric acid so they can withstand the Venusian atmosphere. I'd think $1.5 Beeeellion and 20 years should do it.

No one would have believed, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.

"a background wind that moves at approximately 100 metres per second"

Extra orbits

"JAXA’s mission to study Venus was initially shaky. Akatsuki failed to enter the planet’s orbit in December 2010, and made a second successful orbital burn to get the spacecraft out of the Sun’s orbit and into Venus’s five years later"

I didn't realise I was remotely controlling a real probe while playing KSP.